thisisnotanexit's profile

Five-thirty: the floor staff; the flawed show. The plate-spinners and patient players of the waiting game are lined up like a curtain call rehearsal. Resplendent in regulation black, they provide an ironic, coloured counterpoint to Black’s crew, on the other side of the pass. The family, the front-of-house, – waiters, runners, waitresses, busboys – look rested and bright-eyed: even the one or two who rode out the lunchtime slam are still _presentable_, still fit for public consumption. Not so...

those few, golden years when you thought heidegger would save your life. you stayed up at night, all ideas and hope – and still couldn’t write. you took photographs of all your fucking boring friends, who went to art-house cinemas and smoked cigars and tried to speak french. flushed with last night success, you slept drunk in last night’s dress, plotting dreadful poetry that doesn’t rhyme and doesn’t make sense. the moon climbs sad steps up the sky; you don’t know what it is you want – and if...

Allie Park. Crowds part. Empires sway. Rooms stop – and then start again, and shape themselves to fit. She has always had this conspicuity. It’s not beauty – no, not quite. It’s not the reverse. But she has this ability to _stop_ things – conversations, traffic, hearts – and it is difficult to know what to do with it, so she just carries it around. Other people have their stuff to haul about: their rings and their tats and their scars, which say marriage, masculinity, love, loss, fighting, fu...

At Saint Sepulchre’s the bells say, ‘When will you pay me?’ but Dice, feeling twice the price, sticks simply to his sidewalk sidle, scorns the sheepish Shoreditch shrug-off, and thinks about time and money, and money and time, and how nicely they are tied up in the rhyme. Eleven o’clock. Eleven: yeah, that’s good, thinks Dice. That’s a good deal. Double down. Can’t lose. But let’s not take that train of thought. No: let’s follow Dice as he hies and hoofs, wends and winds and weaves his way, w...

Wednesday morning was, by turns, peculiar and painful. The first event, clearly, was that Allie woke up and got up, although this didn’t become apparent until much later. I lay still and kept hidden, swathed in many windings of duvet and down, thinking: I’m fucked if I’m going out there. It got worse, though: she opened the curtains and I fought back with a sideswipe of horror and nearly got hot tea all over myself. The mug went round a full two revolutions on its base, while I watched, stric...